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You know that day when you plan your life. You will get married, have some children, travel, and grow old together. He laughs about it that he will be chasing you around with his cane in the nursing home. Then one day you wake up and the doctor is telling you that the one you love has Alzheimer. To start making plans with how and when life is going to end. He is young by the standard of what people call old age...only 60 years young.

I was the primary caregiver for my mother, Mama Hawk, for 5 years. She lost her battle with Alzheimer's in June 2012. After her death, I decided to share what I learned and documented it at mamahawksjourney.com in hopes that it may help others on the same journey.

Last July, my wife Esther started acting strangely. I had noticed that her memory had been spotty for about 3 years prior to this incident, but I was finally forced to have her admitted to a nursing facility for dementia. After downsizing and selling our home where we had lived for about 40 years, I was unable to sleep one night and the opening lines of the following poem came to me, so I got up and jotted them down: